Federal Immigration Officials Sued Over LA Deportation Raids (1)

Federal immigration officials are detaining people after stops without suspicion based on racial profiling and holding them in “dungeon-like” facilities without access to counsel, according to a class action complaint in California federal court.

“This comprehensive scheme has been disguised as a crackdown on the ‘worst of the worst,’” the complaint said. “But the preponderance of individuals stopped and arrested in the raids have not been targeted in any meaningful sense of the word at all, except on the basis of their skin color and occupation.”

Legal advocates, impacted family members, and organizers announced the lawsuit outside the Bubble Bath Hand Car Wash in Torrance. The owner of the car wash, Emmanuel, who declined to provide a last name, said at the news conference that he thought he was being robbed when masked agents with guns blocked the exits to his business using unmarked vehicles. They declined to tell him why they’d arrived and arrested two of his workers using the fact they’d tried to run as probable cause, Emmanuel said.

“This is terror on our communities,” said Angelica Salas, executive director for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights.

Agents are pressuring individuals held at “B-18,” an Immigration and Customs Enforcement holding area in the basement of a federal building in downtown Los Angeles, into signing voluntary departure agreements, said the complaint filed Wednesday in the US District Court for the Central District of California.

They are denied food and water “other than what comes out of the combined sink and toilet in the group detention room” and forced to sleep on floors, the lawsuit said. When Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights and Immigrant Defenders Law Center legal representatives tried one day to access the facility federal agents sprayed them with a chemical agent, the complaint said. They’re often shut out of the facility, according to the complaint.

A 2009 settlement agreement required that people can’t be held at B-18 for more than 12 hours and must be able to meet with lawyers. It has since expired but “the unlawful conditions that led to the settlement more than a decade ago are recurring today,” the complaint said.

The tactics in LA are similar to those employed by Customs and Border Protection officials in January Kern County raids, which prompted a federal judge in the Eastern District of California to issue a preliminary injunction in April enforcing due process on stops and arrests in that region, the complaint said.

The complaint comes days after the Trump administration sued LA alleging its sanctuary ordinance fueled riots during protests against the deportation crackdown.

DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin in an emailed statement denied claims that law enforcement is targeting people based on their skin color and said claims that “there are subprime conditions at ICE detention centers are false.”

“These type of smears are designed to demonize and villainize our brave ICE law enforcement,” McLaughlin said.

The case is Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem, C.D. Cal., No. 2:25-cv-05605, 7/2/25.